In a radio interview this week, the Republican lawmaker told a New Hampshire station that he was in the state “because right now I’m running for president,” according to The New York Daily News.

The visit was King’s second of four trips to the traditional home of the nation’s first presidential primary.

The announcement makes King the first Republican to officially declare their intentions to run for president in 2016.[…]King is serving his 11th term in the house. Over the years he has been a vocal member of his party at times, especially on foreign policy issues.

King has been very critical of Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and others in the Republican Party who have expressed a cautious approach to foreign policy, frequently labeling them as ”isolationists,” which is intended to be a pejorative; though the word has lost its meaning because it has become so overused.

Those who King labels as “isolationists” aren’t isolationists at all. Paul, who is a free trader, has explained that he is a realist when it comes to foreign policy, recognizing that America has enemies, but also acknowledging the “landscape of the world as it is…not as we wish it to be.” Paul has offered a “middle path” on foreign policy, one that is “reluctant [and] restrained by Constitutional checks and balances but does not appease” our enemies.

Interestingly, King has said nice things about terrorists in the past. In 1982, the New York Republican praised “those brave men and women” fighting against “British imperialism in the streets of Belfast and Derry,” a reference to the Irish Republican Army (IRA), a nationalist group that for years used terrorism and the deaths of innocents as a tool to advance its cause.